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Comment by djtango | Hacker News Reader

Simpson's paradox does allow for the possibility that nutrition, access to knowledge, clean water and material wealth has improved in the aggregate while it getting worse for subpopulations.

A lot of people in the world are angry and one of the things that fuels this anger is the "gaslighting" that the data shows their lives are better while their lived reality is the opposite.

Don't forget that Millennials are the first generation to be poorer than their parents in a long time...

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Millennials are 30-45, roughly.

There’s now a large segment (and several generations) of society for whom the system has never worked, even if the growth of retirement accounts masks the loss of wealth and well-being.

> Don't forget that Millennials are the first generation to be poorer than their parents in a long time...

This is simply not true. At some point, we do need to rely on data other than "lived experience," which compares one's quality of life at 22 to someone's quality of life at 50.

"Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.23 for every $1 of wealth owned by Gen Xers at the same age."

"Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.35 for every $1 of wealth owned by baby boomers at the same age."

https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of...

If they ever want to own a house they won't need just 23% or 35% more wealth, but more like 200% and 1000% respectively. You do need to start at lived experience to know which data to look at.

Exactly - people have it backwards, when data diverges from lived experience you don't tell lived experience to shut up cuz' dataa you go back and check your models and your data collection. And you check and you check and you check. Einstein was famously wary of Quantum Mechanics rather than taking the findings at face value, and I guarantee that economic data is a hell of a lot less rigorous and more complicated than particle physics. Not to mention the data is political...

It's funny, I say the exact same thing about crime in NYC.

Statistically it's safer than rural Oklahoma... but your lived experience in taking the subway 45 minutes every day will not paint the same safety experience that can't be found in any statistic.

That's silly. People have wrong impressions about a lot of things. Your "lived experience" (you can just say experience, okay?) can be wrong.

The thing is that that's not a conflict between data and lived experience, it's just a conflict between different sets of data. If you measure wealth and then you measure wealth relative to housing costs, neither one of those is "lived experience". If you do a survey on people's sentiments about the economy, that's data too. I'm skeptical of the term "lived experience" precisely because people tend to use it in arguments of the form "let's disregard data in favor of my individual preferences". But when you aggregate the "lived experience" of many people, you get data, and that data can be just as valuable as more anodyne economic data.

The problem with countering lived experience with data, is that whatever data you can provide, it's very unlikely to capture the exact sentiment you're addressing. That doesn't mean one shouldn't try, of course. But one should be very open to the possibility that things are happening outside of your specific data.

The most infuriating example, to me, is the overuse of GDP. As if that should tell us everything.

No, it shouldn't tell us everything, but if someone makes a very data-oriented claim ("millenials will be the first generation poorer than their parents") and you return with data that shows the opposite, you can make a claim that the data is poorly gathered, etc.

But pivoting to the "but it's not my lived experience, bro" is weak.

If you made the claim that "millenials have it harder than their parent" then we're talking something where experience can be more useful.

Yes, but I guess I'd say that we should not attempt to capture an exact sentiment in making policy decisions. The bigger the decision, the more people are involved and affected, and the more people, the greater the variation in their sentiments. It simply doesn't make sense to try to somehow please each individual to address something like housing affordability in the US (or California, or Los Angeles, or even Monterey). The only way to do that is to aggregate sentiments into data. In doing so you lose precision about those sentiments, but that's good, because some of that precision is measuring idiosyncratic stuff that shouldn't play a role in solving the problem in question.

Who exactly has the "lived experience" of being a member of two different generations?

Assuming this is an earnest question - the lived experience is that for some people, they are less well off than their parents. This is a big enough phenomenon that it has been measured and AFAIK is well accepted as a fact. So being poorer than your parents isn't about living the experience of both your life and your parents.

Although anecdotally my father moved to the UK with my mother with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and by 27 my dad was able to afford his first property in London start a family, all without a uni degree and hadn't even yet finished his accountancy training. He did that without any family help and in fact was sending money home. This has always helped provide a bit of colour of how things have changed

That's mean wealth, not median wealth. Mean millenial wealth at 34[0] is $345,000 and median millenial wealth at 38[1] is $130,000. Given that inequality has been rising steadily in the US over the past 30 years, the mean and median wealth of Gen Xers and boomers were almost certainly closer to each other than for millenials.

0: your source has mean at 34 in 2025, https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of... 1: the best I could find was median at 38 in 2022: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/feb/millennia...

Yeah, but how does millennial median wealth compare to boomer median wealth? That's the question.

I'm happy to be proven wrong.

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